Composer biography pick
Someone recommended Harold Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers for composer histories from Bach to Shostakovich — the post had 69 likes and framed it as a go‑to for music bios (x.com). If you love biographies and music history, it’s being actively recommended in reading circles right now (x.com).
First published in 1970, Harold C. Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers was revised in 1981 and issued in a substantially expanded third edition in 1997 by W.W. Norton. (openlibrary.org) (wwnorton.com) The book’s longer editions run roughly 653 pages and are organized into about 41 chapters that trace composers from Monteverdi through the tonalists of the 1990s. (archive.org) (books.google.com) Schonberg served as chief music critic at The New York Times from 1960 to 1980 and became the first music critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1971. (en.wikipedia.org) (pulitzer.org) Table of contents and publisher notes show the book’s scope runs from Monteverdi and J.S. Bach through Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, with later revisions adding figures such as Philip Glass and John Adams. (archive.org) (wwnorton.com) Later editions explicitly broadened the roster to include women composers like Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Amy Beach and Ethel Smyth and flagged developments in serialism, minimalism and late‑20th‑century tonalism. (amazon.com) (goodreads.com) Contemporary reviews labeled the original release authoritative (Kirkus, Nov. 16, 1970), and reader communities continue to engage with the book online — Goodreads shows a 4.28 average from over 1,600 ratings. (kirkusreviews.com) (goodreads.com) The print editions include bibliographical references (noted around pages 629–642 in one edition) and an index, features that editors and instructors often cite when assigning the book as a single‑volume survey in course reading lists. (archive.org)
